


kill switch save switch

by Timeskipped



Category: Zero Escape (Video Games)
Genre: Angst, Bad Ending, Gen, Knives, Missing Scene, Submarine Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-19
Updated: 2019-09-19
Packaged: 2020-10-24 08:24:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20702915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Timeskipped/pseuds/Timeskipped
Summary: Akane gives Aoi the switch to open all doors in Building Q.“I thought you made this for emergencies,” he says, shifting his weight uneasily, gripping it tightly. “Why are you giving it to me?”Akane’s eyes focus on something in the distance, behind Aoi. He knows that there’s nothing there but miles of desert, so he waits until she again focuses her eyes on him. She looks calm. “You’ll know when to press it,” she replies, simply. Aoi doesn’t understand.





	kill switch save switch

**Author's Note:**

> This is violent, as tagged, but I'm going to say that it doesn't get any worse than the games themselves do. Enjoy!

The first thing Aoi does when they’re finished with adjusting Building Q for the Nonary Game is hug his sister. He doesn’t hold her tightly, feeling that if he presses too hard on her shoulder blades she might collapse inwards into a pile of ash. Instead, his pale hands stroke her hair gently. She buries her head into his shoulder.

“We’re so close,” Aoi says, breathlessly.

He can feel Akane’s smile. “Yes,” she mutters against his shirt. “Just a few days, and then…” Her hands release him, and he steps back. “We’ll make sure this is a good timeline, won’t we, Aoi?”

Aoi looks at her, now a woman over 20 instead of the girl he knew as his sister back when this all started, and smiles as well. “Of course.”

He’s scared, of course, that he’ll lose her again. He’d do anything for her, but even though he’s spent the last nine years of his life working with her to save her life, whether she slips from his fingers or not is something out of his control. All he has to do is play the Nonary Game and makes sure things go smoothly. That's his main job from here on out, and it's important, even if he’s just an assistant.

He looks at Akane, and for a moment, she looks back at him. He'd do anything to let her live like she should've been able to from the start.

With a deep, shaking breath, Akane’s lip begins to tremble, and she reaches up to hide her face, her long sleeves covering even more than her fingers would. Her shoulders shake despite the heat.

“Akane,” he says, stepping forward again to pry her hands away from her face. Just as he suspected, she’s begun to cry, her face pink with embarrassment. Aoi frowns at her, reaching up to wipe away her tears. “Come on, don’t cry. You’re going to be fine.”

Akane laughs. “It’s weird. I’m so happy that it’s time, but… It’s overwhelming.” she looks away, hiding her face again. “I’m happy that I’ll see Jumpy again.”

Aoi huffs. He’s not a fan of Akane’s childhood friend, from what she’s told him about the Nonary Game, even though they’ve never met in person. As long as Akane’s happy, though, and as long as he saves her, then Aoi will be fine with him as long as he doesn’t do anything harebrained.

“Let’s find him and get him over here. Then, we’ll make it count.” He looks up at the looming building, feeling the desert’s heat even in the fall. It’s late October, if he’s not wrong—time has gotten away from him a bit, but he remembers seeing Halloween decorations last time he went to the store for regular, non-blackmarket shopping.

The dust outside Building Q is going to choke him, and he’s grateful that they don’t need to work in the Nevada desert for much longer.

While he’s staring at Building Q, he can feel Akane looking at him. Her eyes have a calculating look, something that happens often nowadays. It’s a bitter thing in Aoi’s heart, that she’s changed so much, but it means she’s alive. That’s she’s still trying.

“Aoi,” Akane starts, and Aoi turns back to her. Her tears have been wiped away, and the pink tinge to her face is fading quickly as well. She’s staring at him with an intensity Aoi hasn’t seen in a while.

“Hm?”

She holds something out to him. He quirks a brow as he leans closer, peering into her hand. Held loosely in her palm is the switch to unlock nearly every door in Building Q, with the exception of the final one. The glass above the actual button reflects the strong sunlight into Aoi’s eyes, and he squints at it, trying to figure out why it's being offered to him.

Akane doesn’t explain further, but presses it into Aoi’s hands with a muted smile.

“I thought you made this for emergencies,” he says, shifting his weight uneasily, gripping it tightly. “Why are you giving it to me?”

Akane’s eyes focus on something in the distance, behind Aoi. He knows that there’s nothing there but miles of desert, so he waits until she again focuses her eyes on him. She looks calm. “You’ll know when to press it,” she replies, simply. Aoi doesn’t understand.

“What do you mean? How will I _know?_ You’re the one who knows everything about the game.”

Akane shakes her head. “I don’t know. But… you should have it. Just in case.”

Aoi ends up pocketing it. On the final night before they place themselves into the game, when everyone has been taken and they just need to start it, Aoi stares at it and wonders what situation would end with him pressing this button.

The glass already has minute scratches; it's an imperfect thing filled with enough power to end everything they’ve been working towards. He remembers her instructing the people working for them to create alternate locks for all the doors, able to be disabled easily, with just the press of this button held in his hand. He could unclasp the glass cover and doom both of them right now.

Why had she given him such an important piece? The button is just another thing he has to keep track of without understanding, and he’ll do it for her, but he still wonders. Maybe she really doesn’t know, another thing pulled subconsciously from the morphogenetic field.

He stuffs it in one of his pockets and tries to forget it.

* * *

Junpei is a fucking bastard and Aoi—now called Santa—would very much like to complain to Akane how utterly stupid her taste in men is.

Right after he gets through door 3, that is.

“Y-You son of a bitch!” Aoi yells, and Junpei stands smugly in front of the door, casually telling them that it’s either Aoi alone, or Lotus and Clover together who gets to go through. “You tricked us!”

For the persona that Aoi is playing, he thinks that this will spell out his death. For the real Aoi, it means getting separated from his sister. That’s something he can’t let happen, no matter how much trickery Junpei does.

He clenches his fists by his side. Was this why Akane had made it so the two of them have different numbers than shown on their bracelets, and forced them to be together in every door or else be found out? Was it all for this sense of urgency creeping into him? He can’t deny that it's effective, but he hates this feeling, this uncertainty, the sickness seeping through his guts.

“Then all that stuff you were going on about,” Aoi continues, referring to how Junpei had said that he wanted to test the RED, making Seven and Akane authenticate before doing it himself, “is all bullshit!” Aoi is furious.

Junpei smirks, and Aoi has never wanted to punch him more. “Bullshit? I don’t think so. Didn't I tell you I'd figured out another way to get out of here? This is it.”

“Why the hell would you do something like this?!”

Junpei doesn’t reply, but Aoi feels his heart drop into his stomach as Junpei glances at Akane. The girl looks so concerned, curling in her shoulders in an attempt to look small. Junpei’s brown eyes rest on his childhood friend, and Aoi stares at Junpei with disgust.

“Jumpy…” Akane says. Her voice is soft and nervous.

How dare Junpei, for his own selfish want to stay with Akane, force her to her death? It doesn’t matter that it’s unintentional, Aoi is officially going to hate Junpei to the grave. This whole thing is absolute _bullshit._

“You did this just so you could go through the same door as June...?! That's it?!” He spits his words at Junpei, nearly ready to fight him, then and there.

Junpei just stands calmly, looking back at Aoi with a neutral expression. His hand is still on the lever. He closes his eyes for a moment, and when he opens them again, he speaks. “So, who’s it going to be?” his voice is deathly calm. He’s certain in his stupid fucking choice. “Santa…? Or Lotus and Clover…?”

There’s a moment of hesitation, and the only thing Aoi can say is, “Shit…!” He looks at Lotus and Clover, the latter of whom is still sitting on the bed, staring at nothing, just like she has ever since Snake went missing. The moment stretches on. Junpei looks expectedly between them.

“We’re going!” Lotus yells, finally. “Clover!”

And then she’s pulling Clover up by the arm, dragging her to the door. Clover’s eyes grow wide, and Aoi realizes that his window of time to get in the door, to not ruin everything they’ve been working towards, is closing. His bursts into motion, leaping after the two of them only a moment after they start, running as fast as he can until he surpasses them.

“No! Wait!” Lotus calls, but Aoi has been keeping himself athletic ever since the first Nonary Game. The two of them have no chance.

Aoi yells something unintelligible as he slams his hand against the RED. His palm stings slightly from the force. “This is insane!” he shouts, glaring at Junpei and taking deep steady breaths. “This isn’t right!” Not only leaving Lotus and Clover to think that they’ll die together in the ship, but also...

Junpei did this to them, to _Akane,_ and Aoi doesn’t care why. He knows that Junpei and him are similar, doing it all for Akane, but with everything that’s happened, he can’t help but feel sick. He and Akane are doomed because of Junpei’s goddamn obsession with the door that hides the dead body of Nijisaki, who Aoi had brought here only recently.

“Yes, well…” Junpei replies, tone clipped and cold. “You may be right.” Aoi breathes heavily, but even that doesn’t drown out the sound of the lever being pulled, and the grating metal sounds as the door opens for them.

“Go!” Junpei yells, and they do. Aoi runs after them, into the gaping mouth of the door and not sparing a glance for those left behind. Instead, he focuses on keeping himself alive, thinking back to everything Akane ever said about door number 3. There has to be some way out.

When the doors shut, a heavy sound that marks how they’ve been enclosed inside, Aoi ignores the beeping coming from his left wrist in favor of turning on his heel, ready to give Junpei a piece of his mind. He’ll do it even if he has to keep in character.

“You son of a bitch, Junpei! This isn’t fair!” He clenches his hands into fists, even when his nails dig mercilessly into his palms. The spark of pain matches the desperation curling around his heart and squeezing. “Do you realize what you just did?! You leave them out there, and they can’t—”

“Shut it!” Seven yells. “That’s enough! We gotta find the DEAD, or none of this is going to matter! We got less than a minute left! No time for screwin’ around! Get moving!” His voice is loud in the dark area they find themselves in, and Aoi scoffs quietly.

But he still runs to find the DEAD, just like the others. When Seven points at the only available door, they all scramble inside the hallway after he opens the door for them, just like Akane had said he would.

(“There’s no need to point it out ourselves,” her eyebrows were furrowed, focusing on the paper in front of her, a bunch of haphazard notes scribbled onto it. “It’s much safer to let them figure it out naturally, with only a handful of hints. That goes for most of the puzzles, actually. That’s what the rest of them are for. In addition to everything else, of course...”)

“I found it!” Junpei calls. “The DEAD’s right over there!” He leads them towards it, but stops, stumbling slightly in the dark, wet room.

Aoi knows what happened in this room. Akane knows it, too, but Junpei and Seven remain oblivious, running into the room. They all head straight for the blinking red light on the DEAD, a beacon to save them, but the two unknowing participants don’t pay attention to the slick floors, nor do they still enough to pay attention to the stench wafting through the air.

It’s something familiar. It’s the scent of blood, and gore, and death.

Aoi forces himself not to gag. He’s already breathing heavily from the way they ran for their lives through the rooms, and that combined with the dead body of one of the worst people that Aoi has ever had the displeasure to have known makes it hard to breathe.

Once they’ve all slammed their hands against the DEAD and the beeping from their bracelets stops, Seven starts to laugh, his body thumping against the wall as he relaxes from the adrenaline rush of a near-death situation. “Heh. It stopped. It stopped…” and then he laughs more, a hearty sound that can’t quite wash away the terror of what’s happening.

Aoi relaxes, though, despite the relief only being lukewarm. As the adrenaline fades, the scent becomes even stronger. “What the—”

And then Aoi really does gag. He retches, mentally compelling the little food he has in his stomach not to come up. He forces himself not to lose his composure nor his character, wrinkling his nose and speaking an easy line. “W-What the hell is this smell?! This is vile!” He covers his nose and mouth with one hand, hoping to escape the burnt smell. “I’m gonna puke!”

The fact that he actually is feeling sick really sells the lie that he doesn’t know what’s going on. It’s not that he feels sorry for Nijisaki, but the gore surrounding him could never feel pleasant. It makes it easy, in a way.

He could tell that the others have begun to smell it too. Their vague outlines in the dark pause, no longer moving. He can tell that they think it’s as awful as he does. He thinks he can see Akane, arms wrapped around herself.

The smell of something, anything burning has always been something that makes her go pale. They aren’t 12 and 15 anymore, but that one day has scarred the two of them more than anything else ever has. Aoi feels more bile climb it’s way up his throat. The memories still feel raw, like an open wound. Even though this Nonary Game is necessary, it still feels like he’s pouring salt into it.

But his sister isn’t dead. He has to remember that.

“Let’s get the lights on, first,” Seven says, sounding worn out. “There’s a switch over… here…” He pulled himself off the wall with a grunt, walking slowly towards the light switch, a faint outline from the light coming from the door they had come through. Seven reaches out to touch the lightswitch, flicking it on with a faint click.

Aoi closes his eyes against the sudden brightness just as a piercing scream tears itself from Akane’s throat. He blinks, trying to refocus his vision on what’s going on around him, and his wide eyes land on… on…

Nijisaki is dead. His blood is poured and splattered around his corpse, his flesh torn apart and strewn around the body, which doesn't even look human anymore. Said body has been ripped apart from within, it's guts spilling out. Aoi keeps his hand pressed against his face.

It’s all going exactly as Akane said it would. Their revenge isn’t the entirety of their plan, but it’s the first thing that’s gone right ever since Junpei decided to insist on door 3.

“Looks like an explosion,” Seven says, lowly. He’s frowning at the body, face strained at the sight of the tragedy before him. He’s obviously forcing his voice to keep calm. “Just like the 9th Man… The detonator in his bracelet set off the bomb in his gut.”

Luckily, the clothes were still intact. Aoi clenches his teeth, staring at what looks to be the remains of a man that had been with them for the last few hours of their lives before suddenly vanishing. Now, it’s Aoi’s turn to continue the charade. He glances briefly at Junpei, whose eyes are wide, taking in the sight in full detail.

He hates that Akane is seeing through his eyes. He hates it more than he hates that Junpei brought them onto this path. More than he hates Cradle Pharmaceuticals.

“Is that… Snake…?” Aoi doesn’t have to fake the way his voice trembles.

He’s not a bad person for going along with Akane’s plan. Not if it means saving her life. But that doesn’t mean that he can’t shudder in the face of what they’ve done. Even if Cradle deserves it.

“Oh my God,” Junpei says. He looks to be on the verge of collapsing to the ground.

Suddenly, Akane began to scream. Her voice broke, but she kept on yelling, and Aoi could see, under the shower room’s lights, the beading of tears in her wide eyes. “No! No!” Her voice is raw and pained. “_No!_”

Aoi’s heart leaps into his throat at the sound. Her hands reach for her hair, tugging until Aoi’s almost afraid that she’s going to rip it out of her head with the pure fright that she’s showing.

Junpei reaches for her, fingers outstretched to grab her, to keep her in place, but she runs to the door, the one that will eventually let them out, and Aoi sucks in a quiet breath as she bangs and screams and _begs_ for Zero to let them go. Her hands become red and raw as she continues to cry out.

And as she screams, desperately trying to escape, Aoi can’t tell if it's real or not. He can’t understand his sister perfectly, he never has, but the way her voice echoes around them, bouncing off the shower room’s walls as she hits the metal again and again, it looks so painfully genuine that Aoi wants to save her all over again.

The pounding of her fists on metal sound like his did, nine years ago, a door away from the incinerator. He shudders, staring at her with eyebrows furrowed in concern.

Whether her fear is actually happening, or whether it's a ploy to distract Junpei, or whatever, it doesn't matter. Aoi can’t help her. He could never save her, and now, she keeps struggling even as Junpei pulls her away from the door and towards his chest.

“No!” Akane cries, digging her heels into the ground. “Get off of me! Let me go! Let me go!”

And then she falls limp, as suddenly as she’d started screaming. Her breathing is heavy as she and Junpei slide to the floor. Junpei’s arms wrap around her, and he rests his head on her shoulder. Akane squeezes her eyes shut, her hands pale even against the white of the tiles. When she opens her eyes again, Aoi can see her tears, dripping down onto Junpei’s skin as she begins to shake and sob.

“We’re going to be fine...” Junpei says, loud enough for Aoi and Seven to hear. Aoi shifts his weight to one side, aiming for a look of nervousness and concern. “It’s gonna be alright, June.” His voice gets softer as he continues, until Aoi can only hear the very beginning of what Junpei says next: “It’s going to be okay…”

Akane nods at him after his lips finish moving, right next to her ear. “Thank you...” she says, her voice wavering with the remnants of her sobs. “Thank you so much, Jumpy.” She smiles, but it’s weak and fragile.

The two of them continue like that, in their own sappy world on the shower room’s floor, and Aoi just watches. Glancing at Seven, he sees that the large man seems relieved, if only because Akane’s outburst has ended. Aoi rubs the back of his neck and sighs softly. At the very least, it’s helped Akane. Even if Aoi doesn’t like Junpei, even if he _hates_ him, that’s all that matters.

Akane leans back to rest her head against Junpei, and the two of them stay like that, not speaking anymore, not even in whispers, until a couple minutes later. After that time in silence, Junpei stands slowly, lifting Akane gently by the arms to help her up as well.

Akane doesn’t look at Aoi or Seven. She looks at her feet with a nervous hand to her mouth, hiding her expression. She doesn’t speak, and neither does Junpei. The four of them are encased in a fragile, careful quiet, even as the fake ship creaks beneath them.

Aoi is silent as Junpei looks at him and Seven. Junpei’s gaze is sad, as if the concern he feels is crushing him. Aoi almost loses his contempt for the idiot, because he feels the same. Aoi feels lead has been dropped into his stomach.

Junpei tightens his hold on Akane’s arm, where he’s still touching her, and Aoi knows that he's thinking about how to escape the shower room. In silence, the four of them feel the heaviness of the situation together, before any of them move.

It's Seven who breaks off from the rest first. “We should start looking,” he says, placing a hand on his head and pulling his beanie slightly over his eyes. “We gotta get out of here.”

The rest of them nod, including Akane, who wipes away her tears with her sleeve. Aoi watches her as she goes off to investigate, before turning in the opposite direction to look around himself.

About halfway through their investigation of the room, Aoi notices Junpei nearby, fiddling with the thermometer on the wall. He’s holding the screwdriver and beginning to screw it off, but that could take a bit of time. Aoi watches him for just a moment longer before he speaks.

“Hey, Junpei…” Aoi starts. “You know why thermometers only go up to 107 degrees Fahrenheit, or 75 degrees Celsius, like this one?” He doesn’t know why he says that. Maybe it’s the reminder of what he and his sister went through to get to this moment. Maybe he just wants to fill in the silence.

Maybe it doesn’t matter.

Junpei doesn’t look over to Aoi when he replies. “No, can’t say I ever thought about that,” he says, twisting the screwdriver. The screw is long, and Aoi stares at it as it begins to emerge from the wall.

“At 107 degrees, the cells in the human body start to die, and the organs begin to shut down. The proteins in your cells start to harden.” He stares harder. He feels distant from his own words, like they’re coming from someone else’s mouth. “It’s like when you hard-boil an egg. Even if you cool it down afterwards, it won’t go back to being a raw egg. In other words, it’s dead. That’s why thermometers don’t go past 107. There’s no point.”

“Oh yeah?” Junpei asks nonchalantly, and suddenly Aoi’s feelings come back to him in a wave. His sister died from high temperatures. Now, Aoi is talking vaguely about how it happened to the only person who could possibly save her. But as his grief and his anger come back to him, he realizes, suddenly, that he doesn’t want to be the only one who’s aware of this. He doesn’t want to be alone.

Aoi looks away. “But it’s pretty rare for a fever to get that high,” he continues. He can taste something like bile in the back of his mouth. “Even viruses and stuff don’t usually drive the body temperature up to 107. Of course, there are other, external things that could...”

“...Like what?”

“Well, let’s see… Something like getting locked in a sauna… Or,” he clenches his fists, unseen by Junpei, “getting thrown into an incinerator and burnt to death…”

“Ha!” Junpei barks out a laugh. “Yeah, I guess that would get a little hotter than 107 degrees Fahrenheit.” The screw falls out of the wall, and Junpei pulls the thermometer off with only a little force. “All right, got it!”

Aoi doesn’t even realize he's been glaring at the wall until he notices out of the corner of his eye that Junpei is looking at him strangely.

Junpei’s ease of joking with him isn’t fair, not when Aoi has such a deep hole where his heart should be. He breathes in slowly, trying to center himself to be able to play it off easier, but he finds that his raw emotions aren't so easily quelled. His chest aches.

“H-Huh?” Junpei says, “What’s up…?”

Aoi doesn’t reply for a minute, biting his tongue. Junpei’s hands tightens slightly around the thermometer. “...Nothing,” Aoi says finally. It's better this way. “Forget about it.”

He spins on his heel and walks away from Junpei, off to pretend that he's investigating a different part of the room. He hunches his shoulders as he does, not sure what to do with himself now; not sure if things will work out. He's not sure he can make this a good timeline for Akane.

Right now, he's just a failed Santa.

When he glances at Akane, across the room, her lips quirk up into an almost imperceptible smile, shining with sympathy.

* * *

Clover’s face is pale, and Aoi almost feels bad for her. Things have already gone horribly wrong, though, from the very moment Aoi entered the number 3 door, and by now he’s just holding onto his emotions by a thread. If one more thing happens, he’s going to lose it.

But Santa, the person Aoi is acting as, isn’t like that. Santa believes that he can escape if he just waits with Clover, Ace, and June on the stairs for Junpei, Seven, and Lotus to return from door 2. So he sits on the step next to Clover and ignores the burning black hole sucking at his insides.

“Don’t you think we should go look for the number 9 door too?” Akane suggests, looking curious. She looks natural, like that, and if Aoi didn’t know better he’d think she was alive.

“Give it up,” he mutters. “What’re we going to find? What doors can we even go through?”

“Well,” Ace says. “Clover and Santa and I have a digital root of eight, see? One plus three plus four. The three of us could go through the number 8 door, if you’d like us to explore.” Ace is right; that's the only option, since they haven't unlocked the 1 or 6 doors. He smiles in a friendly way, and Aoi sighs, slumping over his knees.

It’s hopeless. All of this is hopeless…

Aoi and Akane have to go through doors together, and while he’s not sure why Akane made it like that, the fact is that it throws more complexity into this part of their plan. Aoi knows how to get out of going through different doors, though; he glances at Clover. She’s staring at her shoes without saying anything. She’s probably calculating her brother’s killer.

Aoi can almost relate.

“Wh-What?” Akane looks shocked, pressing her knuckles to her lips in a nervous gesture. “But then I’d be left behind. I don’t think Santa wants to go…” her eyes travel to the steps where the two of them sit.

Aoi stands. “I’d go,” he says, rubbing the back of his neck, “but I doubt Clover’s up for it.” He looks down at the girl, still staring. “Besides… If one of us is Zero, I don’t really want to be in a room with him. No offence,” he looks around.

Clover stares at the floor. Akane sucks in a breath. Ace looks disappointed.

“I thought we agreed to trust each other,” Ace says. “I sincerely doubt that Zero will make his move while we’re in the middle of getting through the doors.”

“How do you know that?” Clover’s soft voice startles Aoi, and he raises his eyebrows at her.

“What do you mean?” Akane wrings her hands.

“I mean that maybe Zero is one of the people we let go down to door 2. Or maybe he’s one of us, just waiting to kill the rest… It seems awfully convenient, doesn’t it?”

Aoi looks at the others. Clover isn’t meeting their eyes. She obviously thinks she knows who Zero is, and Aoi wonders if it’s the same as the timeline where she kills them with an axe. Aoi keeps his face neutral. Ugh.

Ace’s face is set in thought. Akane is glancing nervously from person to person.

Akane meets Aoi’s eyes. Aoi feels his heart sink. He already knew that she was going to die, but it had never felt real. Now, she sways on her feet from the fever eating at her, and all Aoi wants is to reach out to her and hold her, one more time.

“I see what you mean,” Ace’s voice breaks the silence. “So you suspect one of us, is it? Which one? We should get our suspicions out in the open, so that our trust can be repaired.” His smile feels more like a threat.

“Maybe it was all three of you who did it,” Clover says, and her eyes finally rise to meet theirs. She glares at them with a passion, her eyes rimmed red with the results of her crying. Her mouth pulls into a sneer. “I’d rather die than help one of the people who killed my brother!”

Aoi calculates it in his mind quickly. 1 + 3 + 6 + 2 = 12, 1 + 2 = 3. The three of them and Snake could’ve opened the number 3 door together, if they were the murderers.

“What the fuck are you saying?” he yells, backing away from Clover. “I didn’t kill anyone!”

Clover stands, her hands balling into fists. It won’t help her against any of them, but she still walks closer. “My brother was murdered by someone on this ship,” she says, leaning forward to get into Aoi’s face. He keeps his eyes on her’s. “And I’m going to kill those bastards in—”

She lets out a choking sound.

Akane screams.

It’s that sound that fills Aoi’s ears, even after it stops, and even as Clover falls forwards, gasping at Aoi’s shoulders, her fingernails digging hard into his skin. Aoi looks away from her to see Ace standing behind her. Gentarou Hongou is a frightening figure, his face warped into a smile.

And then Clover is screaming, too, and she whips around to attack Hongou even as the knife is ripped out of her back.

Something wet and red hits Aoi on the shoulder, soaking into his formerly pure white tank top, and it’s that the spurs him back into motion, letting him reach for Akane. Akane looks about to faint, and tears are watering in her eyes as she looks at the scene that Aoi desperately wants to shield her from. One of his hands reaches the railing next to her, and he looks up the stairs, at the only route of escape they have left.

“Thanks for showing your back to me, but if you move another step, I’ll kill this girl.”

Aoi freezes in place. There’s no escaping his own death, at this point. He knows that.

He _knows_ that.

He squeezes his eyes shut for a moment, not looking at the way Akane braces herself, not listening to her shallow breaths, and turns around to face Hongou, who’s holding Clover with his knife to her throat.

“I knew it was you!” Clover screams, scraping her nails against his hand. Her face is nearly pure white, though, and the way her back is pressed against Hongou makes it easy for Aoi to see the spreading blood on Hongou’s coat. “I won’t let you get away with this!”

The knife draws blood, and it trails down her neck in a singular red line. Aoi hears a gasp behind him from Akane.

He can’t move, only able to watch what’s happening in front of him.

He knows he should run, but what’s the point? Akane is already dead. Aoi thinks he can remember the other history already: the smell of burnt flesh turned his stomach, and his hands felt like they were covered in his sister’s ashes for days, weeks, _months_ afterwards. Her death was branded into his soul.

Akane is dying from a fever that doesn’t exist. She died in the Gigantic’s incinerator nine years ago. Aoi had pounded on the metal door until his hands were black and blue, and still, the only way to save her was for Junpei to get to the incinerator, nine years later.

Wait—

Junpei? Junpei is alive. The incinerator still exists.

The switch sits like a stone in his pocket. If he just presses it, he can open the incinerator for Junpei. He can flaunt it, maybe, say he’s Zero, and then Hongou will take his anger out on him, and Akane can escape. Akane can live.

Akane can live.

Hongou looks impatient. He steps towards the stairs, dragging Clover along with him. She continues to struggle, even as it makes the blade digs deeper, closer to an artery. Aoi’s hands shake with anticipation.

_Akane can live Akane can live Akane can live Akane can live Akane can—_

All it’ll take is Aoi’s death. It’s a small price to pay.

Hongou reaches the base of the stairs, and Aoi looks down at him, glaring harshly. He almost wants to smirk, knowing that Hongou will be outmatched by Aoi’s plan. Aoi will be the victor, a sacrifice for Akane’s success.

He feels a heavy hand on his shoulder. He doesn’t have to look to know that it’s Akane, leaning on him for more stability.

He doesn’t know if she’ll be fast enough at running. He doesn’t know if she’ll be able to find a place to hide from Hongou. He doesn’t know when Junpei, Seven, and Lotus will return, or if they’ll even be able to figure out what happened.

Aoi nearly laughs. It’s the only chance he has, a small possibility among a thousand universes in which the morphogenetic field won’t help his sister. A million histories where his sister’s eyes turned calculating and she obsessed over becoming Zero for nothing.

_Run,_ he thinks, and hopes that it reaches Akane.

(Danger and epiphany are both there. All he needs now is luck. Maybe he’ll bet his soul on it, on all the hope, faith, love, and luck in the universe.)

He reaches into his pocket.

“Why do you look so smug, Santa?” Hongou asks, stepping forward. He hauls Clover upwards, and her toes leave the ground momentarily. “Haven’t you realized it’s pointless?”

Aoi has to be confident, has to lock away the bitter parts of himself and surge to stop the man who’s haunted him for years. This is his only chance for revenge in this timeline. This is where it counts, and he can’t afford to be scared.

Aoi is scared. He’s so scared that he can’t bring himself to push forward quickly enough to make a difference. Akane’s hand is heavy on his shoulder, tightening as if she knows what he’s about to do.

“Oh well,” Hongou says. It doesn’t sound like he cares.

Aoi can feel the switch in his pocket, but he can’t quite grasp it. Hongou’s eyes flicker down to where his hand is resting, above his pocket. Hongou steps forwards. Aoi takes a breath. He plunges his hand towards the device that could save his sister if he just—

He steps forwards as well, trying to match Hongou’s confidence. He can feel Akane’s hand slipping from his shoulder. Her breathing picks up.

Clover lands a desperate blow on Hongou’s face, but he barely even flinches, simply clenching the knife further and pressing it into the girl’s skin until she’s writhing in pain. She shrieks in rage, grasping for Hongou even as her grip weakens.

Aoi unclasps the glass cover, lifting it up and hovering his thumb above the red button. Despite how preoccupied Hongou is with Clover, Aoi smirks as Hongou lays eyes on what he’s holding, and his eyes widen.

“Zero gave me something interesting,” Aoi says, raising his other hand into a nonchalant gesture. “Let her go, or else.”

Hongou sneers at him, teeth clenched, and throws Clover to the floor. Her blood splatters around her, and she falls to the floor ungracefully, spreading the crimson liquid further. She coughs, but doesn’t get up again. Hongou clicks his tongue at her.

Aoi feels a surge of rage. How dare he look down at the participants of the first Nonary Game? How dare he do this to them, how dare he attempt to kill their siblings, and how _dare_ he pretend that he doesn’t deserve this. Hongou is the worst of the worst, and Aoi will make him pay if it’s the last thing he does.

Perhaps it will be, in this timeline.

That's what he thinks as Hongou lifts his hands into a false surrender, fingers still clasped around the bloody knife. Aoi notices the ugly red patch on the front of his coat as he steps forward. Aoi stares at the man in front of him, knowing exactly what he's going to try.

He realizes too late that Akane hasn’t moved. As Hongou roars, charging forwards, Aoi presses the button, dropping the switch and twisting around to shield his sister from anything he can. The button clatters on the floor, and Aoi stares at Akane's wide purple eyes.

Akane needs to run, but she's not moving, _why is she not moving?_

Hongou’s advance is too fast for either of them. Aoi is hit in the abdomen, and he clutches his stomach as he falls, completely winded.

But he wasn’t stabbed. He looks up through watery eyes to see Hongou grinning as he plunges the knife into Akane’s side. He's going too fast to have any sort of precision, but Aoi can tell a wound that will result in death without treatment when he sees one.

Akane’s knuckles are white as she grasps the stairs’ railing, letting out a strangled noise. Hongou looks about ready to go at her again, but Aoi can't let that happen. His whole goal had been to save her, and he can feel his blood rushing in his ears.

Aoi pulls himself from the ground as quickly as possible, adrenaline pulling him forward. “You monster,” he coughs out, grabbing Hongou’s arm with as much strength as he can. He can feel his nails digging into Hongou’s skin through his sleeve, and he feels a burst of rage and vindication as Hongou sneers down at him.

Akane falls to her knees. Her face is pink from her fever, and her wide eyes are trained on Aoi.

Hongou is stronger than Aoi. They both know that. Even as he's gotten older, Hongou has never lost that edge he has on the two children he doomed.

That's how Aoi knows he's been stabbed when he suddenly finds himself flat on his back, staring at the ceiling.

“N-No!” Akane exclaims, though Aoi can’t see her. He looks down to see red spreading over his chest. He feels dizzy as the pain sets in, right under his ribs. This is the end, but Akane is still saying something. Her voice sounds so afraid, just like when she was 12. He's reliving the worst day of his life. “Why, Ace?! W-Why are yo—”

Aoi has to help her. His body screams at him to stop when he sits up.

There’s the noise of someone’s shoes on the floor.

And then Aoi freezes.

Clover is standing there on the bottom step, blood dripping from her clothes and her skin. She must be weak from blood loss and pain, much weaker than both Aoi and Akane, but there she is, her long bangs covering her eyes from view. Aoi flicks his eyes over to Hongou. The man glares at Clover.

“You’re supposed to be dead, little girl,” he says. His hand is grasping Akane’s shoulder, but as this new distraction enters his mind, he releases her. “Everyone here is going to die, but you're still fighting it? Pathetic.”

“Did you…” Clover’s voice is barely audible.

“Hm?” Ace turns, and Aoi takes the opportunity to crawl closer to Akane. His hands are pale as he presses down on her wound until they’re stained pink. He grits his teeth against the pain and weakness threatening to consume him so that he can continue to help her. He avoids her gaze, even as his hands shake.

“I said,” Clover says, louder. She steps up a step, but Aoi can see her legs shaking. “Did you say that to my brother before you _killed him?!_” she shouts, and when she looks at Hongou, Aoi feels a chill go down his spine at the rage distorting her expression.

She leaps at Hongou with the ferocity of someone fueled only by that last remaining bit of life. She has no real weapons, only adrenaline and her own strength, but she still manages to grab a hold of Hongou and grip the knife tightly enough that it doesn’t stab her right away. She’s grunting and spitting, but she doesn’t waste any more energy than that. She’s transformed into a different beast than the girl Aoi expected when he heard Akane’s stories of the timeline where she murders them all with an axe.

And Aoi, meanwhile, is the same as ever, unable to save anyone, because he knows that he can’t run. He knows he wouldn't be able to stand, that the spreading pain in his organs is too great for him. The bursting nerves send panic signals that he can’t answer, and they make him want to curl up and protect his vital organs. He can’t possibly escape.

His hands are wet with a combination of Akane’s blood and his own, and it drips down the stairs they lie on. The stench of iron is strong, and he can’t stop it, as much as he would like to.

Akane kneels in front of him, though, and Aoi knows that she can go. Her wound is shallow enough that she might have a chance, even if only for a little. He's unlocked the doors for her, so maybe… maybe she can get to the incinerator. He just hopes that Junpei isn’t too late. He presses harder on Akane’s wound and prays for just that one thing. Junpei may have doomed them, but Aoi squeezes his eyes shut and silently begs for that not to be true.

“This… was always going to happen,” Akane says, barely even a whisper near his ear. He opens his eyes. “I'm sorry… this timeline wasn’t right...” There are tears welling up in her eyes. Aoi feels his own vision blurring, but he forces them away. She pulls her lips into a fragile smile. “At least… I can see Jumpy…”

“Run,” he whispers in a rasping voice. He had tried for the field to send it earlier, but it seems that his luck had run out a long time ago. The morphogenetic field has never done what he wanted it to do. That whispered word is the one part of himself Aoi allows himself to show, before morphing himself back into Santa. He was always unable to stop himself from following Akane’s plans, so he’ll be Santa for as long as she has even a sliver of a chance. Even if it’s not this timeline.

For now, he can’t be Akane’s brother. He's just a stranger, a man who watched her nearly die. He was able to press the button, but Hongou still doesn’t know what the switch did. That monster will be trapped in the incinerator, as some form of karmic justice, unable to solve the final puzzle. The situation, and all he knows, runs on loop in his head.

Aoi is just a stranger here. After all this, he’s just an assistant, looking at his sister for the last time. Their tearful eyes meet for one last time.

Akane presses a hand onto her wound and cringes even as she nods at him, standing shakily and running out of Aoi’s line of vision. His eyes blur until she’s just a purple and brown shape. He can’t even see the way she's holding onto her wound, to see if she’s doing it well enough to prolong her life for just a few more minutes.

As he curls into himself, he hears a thump as Clover’s body hits the stairs, her forehead making a cracking sound against the wood. He listens, but he doesn’t think she's breathing.

He closes his eyes. It's over. He has no more strength left in him.

The world stills for a moment.

(Before the universe collapses in on itself due to a paradoxical girl, one who was never alive to start this game in the first place, images from the future flash through Aoi’s mind.

The girl he tried to protect runs, just like he told her to. When she gets to the submarine room she’ll collapse into a gut-wrenching pile of limbs and blood with no more energy, the doors unlocked for her escape. She will still be alive when Junpei holds her in his arms, but she will be bleeding out, her voice weak as she tells Junpei how glad she was to see him again. She'll smile despite the blood covering her clothes and her hands, and she’ll be able to say goodbye, unlike so many other timelines.

Aoi isn’t alive enough to be glad of that fact.

After Aoi’s sister has disappeared, Junpei will stumble around almost lifelessly, able to observe the corpses of Lotus and Seven. He won't look at them long, only walking back to where his childhood friend’s body has vanished.

And then he will die. He'll stand above the useless submarine, and Aoi can almost see Hongou plunging the knife into his back.)

_Hongou always was a dirty coward,_ Aoi thinks, his face resting painfully against the stairs. Aoi was unable to get his revenge this time, but he can at least be glad that even though Hongou will kill everyone in his way and end up alone in a ship-like building, he won't be able to kill Akane again. She’ll turn into smoke before he can even try.

Aoi chokes out a sound as Hongou stands above him.

“You'll… never win…” Aoi grimaces at the way his own voice sounds. His head is throbbing. Adrenaline flows through his veins, dulling his suffering even as he knows logically, he's going to die.

“I think I already have,” Hongou says. His foot meets Aoi’s back, pressing his wound onto the floor.

Aoi’s vision goes white with burning pain, and when he comes back to himself, he finds that he can hear Akane’s voice in his head.

_I'm sorry Aoi I'm sorry Jumpy I'm sorry I'm sorry I—_

Everything ends, and in a way, it's comforting for Aoi to not be alone in death, even if he can only reach Akane through the morphogenetic field. The doors have been unlocked, but she will never reach the incinerator.

Maybe in the next timeline.

**Author's Note:**

> In the Submarine Ending, Junpei finds doors unlocked that weren't unlocked previously, regardless of whether you went through door 3 or not. The switch is an attempt to explain that.


End file.
